Track Listing

1. I'll Remember April
2. Teach Me Tonight
3. Mambo Carmel
4. Autumn Leaves
5. It's All Right with Me
6. Red Top
7. April in Paris
8. They Can't Take That Away from Me
9. How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me
10. Where or When
11. Erroll's Theme

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6213 in Music
• Released on: 1990-10-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Live

Album Description
180gm vinyl LP pressing. This album, Erroll Garner's first live concert to ever enter the market, was one of the pianist's most acclaimed and best selling recordings from the moment of its release. The combination between Erroll Garner's and the audience's enthusiasm certainly makes it a lively listening experience. Jazzbeat. 2008.

Amazon.com
The sound is atrocious and the piano is out of tune, yet this live trio recording from September 9, 1955, in Carmel, California, was a bestselling album. Garner brings a wealth of imagination to every performance of every song. On uptempo numbers like "I'll Remember April" and "Red Top" he hammers away with intense left-handed figures while unleashing relentless cascades of improvised lines with his right. On ballads like "Teach Me Tonight" and "April in Paris" he plays with the softest of touches, changing tempo from verse to verse for dramatic effect. His performance of "Autumn Leaves" is so over-the-top it could have gone to parody, but not in the hands of this master entertainer. His humming, grunting vocal accompaniment--he seems to be commenting on "They Can't Take That Away from Me" as he plays it--provides a kind of side show to the performance. More than 30 years later it's still starkly original work. --John Swenson

Customer Reviews

One Of A Kind
Concert By the Sea has to be one of the finest jazz concert albums ever recorded. The crowd reactions,Errol's grunting and unbelievable rhythm and talent go beyond words.Every serious and even part time Jazz Piano enthusiast simply has to have this album. I was fortunate to have known and been a good friend of Boston's "Bill Marlowe" whose voice and Jazz radio shows were incomperable and who inroduced Errol Garner to the Boston Area and the writer. The Bill Marlowe concert at the Surf Ballroom in Nantasket featuring Errol was a total sell out. Greatest concert I have ever attended. Don't miss this album. Period. It's a "Must Have".

Great Jazz Piano In Grand Setting On Top-Selling Garner LP
Sure, you can't judge a book by its cover, but a CD? Viewing the front of Erroll Garner's 1955 "Concert By The Sea," seeing majestic Pacific Ocean waves slap a Carmel coastline while a woman waves in triumph, leads you to expect grand semi-classical pieces tailored for the era's big-budget films. Or, worse, sentimental pop in the style of that era's top-selling pianist, Roger Williams.

But this Erroll Garner album remains among jazz's all-time sellers and critical favorites for avoiding such tendancies. Given its acoustics (it was recorded in a converted Carmel, CA church) "Concert By The Sea" is surprisingly intimate, energetic, witty, romantic; the concert you'd expect from the composer of the classic (but missing here) standard "Misty."

Garner, with stellar (though barely audible) help from bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Denzil Best, weaves piano trills and walking lines like spider webs around familiar melodies like "Teach Me Tonight," Cole Porter's lyrical "It's All Right With Me," a swift "Where Or When," and the delightfully drag-beat "Mambo Carnival." He delivers funky, jaunty performaces on "Red Top" and They Can't Take That Away From Me." Only the oft-covered, overdramatic "Autumn Leaves" falls flat.

Garner's playing here draws effortlessly from musical styles before and around him: Fats Waller's Dixieland swing, Charlie Parker's bop (Parker played with Garner on "Cool Blues"), Nat Cole's cooler jazz piano, neo-classical and even R&B piano sounds from Charles Brown and Ray Charles. Listen to Garner's rhythmic piano chording throughout and realize that he anchored his own solo piano excursions (and inspired the similarly inclined Dave Brubeck), in near rock-and-roll bass style.

Yet like the era's most beloved jazz stars (Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, to whom he unfavorably compares his voice at LP's end ) Garner remembered to entertain as well as challenge audiences. He redraws the Broadway and show tunes here, but grounds them in stop-time dramatic endings drawing enthusiastic applause. An exuberant, gleeful performance by a master pianist and entertainer, "Concert By The Sea" is essential to any jazz fan and would benefit from the remastering, extra-track treatment given other classics in Sony/Columbia's legendary jazz catalogue.

Tears to my eyes.......
.....as a little girl in Palo Alto, California probably around 1969 I listened to my father (who is a jazz pianist in his own right) play this record numerous times. It stood out because usually I heard him playing his Bluthner grand piano in his inimitable way and style . . . very influenced by Garner but also his own style.....but then on a regular basis I heard this album. Again and again. It was years later that I realised that although I loved Erroll Garner and had many of his CDs and even his record albums, it was years later that I realized THE recording that was "the one" I remembered -- the one that brings tears to my eyes without seemingly a reason -- it was THIS recording - Concert By The Sea -- I read the editorial review with a smile where they said the "sound is atrocious and the piano out of tune".......well ......no it's not. Not really. It's the sound of "that night" in "that place" and it's Erroll Garner all the way and I give it 5 stars!!!!!! I received my copy today after several months of shamelessly listening to the free samples of the music....(budget is a bit tight these days)... all I can say in closing is this is THE definitive Garner recording!!